DEFINITION AND ETYMOLOGY The definition of land as property as it relates to racial capitalism can be located in the process by which land became property in a colonial context, which involved racialized hierarchy, theft and abstraction. The commodification of land that resulted from this process made it useful in the racial capitalist system. That is, land gained value through its commodification (through racialized means) and could then be exchanged. While the idea of land as property emerged hundreds of years ago, themes of theft, abstraction and racialized hierarchy underlie our modern definition of land. The concept of land in racial capitalism finds its historical origins in John Locke’s explicit connection between land, money, cultivation and property. According to Alyosha Goldstein in “The Ground Not Given,” Locke wrote, “As much Land as a Man Tills, Plants, Improves, Cultivates, and can use the Product of, so much is his Property.” (Goldstein 86) Goldstein continues that a landowner did not have to actually be the one to work the fields, but could pay people (or force enslaved people) to work the land — and thus gain property ownership over it. Therefore, as early as the 17th century, there was a clear link between money, labor and land as property. With colonialism and expansion in settler colonial states, land became more of an abstract commodity. Goldstein writes, “Likewise with land, the Lockean emphasis on possession and use as the basis of ownership, although not relinquished in colonial ideology, gave way to an increasing treatment of land as a thoroughly alienable commodity and a financial asset” (Goldstein 88). The process by which land became a tradeable commodity in the U.S. can be located in westward expansion. For example, the U.S. government abstracted land into rectangular plots under President Thomas Jefferson, which allowed it to be transferred from the government to individuals (Krall 138). This transfer was often completed in a semi-legal way that illuminates the theft inherent to the transformation of land to property. During expansion into the American west before the Civil War, the U.S. government made it technically illegal for Americans to squat in federally owned western territories, as they had been doing before. However, “If [American citizens] sufficiently improved the land and raised enough capital to eventually buy it from under themselves at auction, they were effectively exonerated of the crime of trespass” (Nichols 18). The process of buying land after cultivation includes both Lockean logics of improvement from putting money into the land, as well as the abstract notion of being able to “buy” land “at auction,” which requires a certain commodification. It also highlights the cooperation of government and citizens in transforming land into property under racial capitalism. Though U.S. citizens were trespassing on government-owned land, they were rewarded for breaking the law if they cultivated the land sufficiently. This reproduces the original theft of American lands, which was perpetrated against Indigenous people who had been living there for thousands of years. Post-Civil War American expansionism thus reinforces the notion that land as private property in the U.S. has always relied on legal gray areas, and a seeming violation of legal norms for the sake of capital. An essential piece of the transformation of land into property is the racialized hierarchy baked into the process. Land could be stolen from Indigenous people because they were seen as “backward,” and Black people were used to cultivate that land because they were seen as property. (Bhandar 7) Furthermore, according to Tiffany King’s notion of Black Fungibility, Black bodies were used to project settler aspirations for territorial expansion (King 1025-6). King draws on one colonial traveler’s observations of laboring Black women, and his confusion over their roles as workers. King quotes another scholar, Morgan, as describing the traveler’s confusion as follows. “He compares African people to vegetation; they are passively and abstractly beautiful as blocks of color” (King 1027). Reading this colonial traveler as well as Morgan’s work, King concludes that Black bodies had infinite metaphorical value for different uses, in particular Black bodies allowed settlers to conceive of newly settled lands as territory. Because “African people” seemed abstract and passive, like “blocks of color,” they could be used as empty canvases for the settler’s imagination. Adding Black Fungibility to Locke’s idea of creating property out of land through cultivation, it’s clear that Black bodies help provide the intellectual foundation for land becoming property. They allowed settlers literally to cultivate the land, as well as conceive of the land as cultivatable. With this etymology, a cohesive definition of land with respect to racial capitalism emerges. In the Americas, European settlers developed a notion of land becoming property through cultivation, which was underlied by racialized notions of who could own land—namely, white settlers and no one else. This definition, though primarily historical, has implications for racial capitalism as it manifests today. LAND AS AN ANALYTIC FRAME Adopting land as a lens through which to analyze systems of power and capital is essential in seeing how the processes of capitalism, racialization, colonialism, and imperialism are interconnected. Land as an analytic illuminates the ways in which systems develop in relation to geographic space and how those relations contribute to social, economic, and political structures. These relationships manifest themselves both in the changes in populations and also in the landscape itself, illuminating the ways systems impact both human and physical geographies. Land as a physical anchor offers a firm basis for connecting theories which may be considered temporally disparate. When analyzing scholarly works, land offers a significant lens through which to approach capital and colonial states. Geography as a discipline does important work in uncovering the connections between society and land with new studies centered around critical geography creating radical and leftist approaches to the deconstruction of relations to and across land. In his broader critique of capitalism, Marx conceptualizes colonialism and slavery as so called “primitive accumulation,” essentially pre-captialist forms of violent aquisition of resources and land. In doing so, he fails to acknowledge the inherent interconnections of race and capitalism (Singh 33). Adopting land as a lens through which to approach these historical processes and structures reveals the relationship between colonialism, settler colonialism, and slavery in relation to capitalism. Understanding colonial acquisition of land and development of the property relationship to land as quintessential to capitalist development reveals the interconnection of race and capitalism, and that “primitive accumulation” is actually an essential aspect of capitalism (Melamed 76). The dynamics of land has led scholars in the fields of critical theory, postcolonial/decolonial studies, indingeous studies, and beyond to critically approach land as an object of study and an analytical lens. The possibilities of using land offers significant opportunities to look beyond traditional distinctions in academia, uncovering new connections and areas of study. As a key term within the field of American studies, land requires that scholars and activists understand the material dynamics between racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and the development of the U.S. nation-state. The ways in which racial capitalism has altered the landscape of the Americas demand that relationships with land be interrogated both in the past and how they have developed up into the present. Questions of indigenous dispossession and sovereignty are central in discussions of land in American studies. The settler colonial state’s imposition of borders and governing structures on the lands currently occupied by the settler colonial governments of the United States and Canada are contemporary issues which indigneous scholars and activists continue to grapple with. Movements of resistance like the protests at Standing Rock and similar pipeline-related threats to indigenous land and sovereignty have recently received national attention. For many indigenous nations, however, these threats to their sovereignty and relationships to land are built into the territorial relationship between land and the nation state. Indigenous nations with relationships to land that transcend borders of the State like the Akwesasne Reserve on the US-Canada border and the Kumeyaay Nation on the US-Mexico border are prime examples of the ways in which land and human relationships to land are continually contested today. “STATES OF UNREST” (VICE, 2020) VICE recently released a YouTube series called States of Unrest, in which a reporter explores the various ways that the U.S. is grappling with COVID-19, the events of this summer surrounding the murder of George Floyd, fires in Oregon, and disputes over Trump’s wall. Of particular interest is the dispute over the wall, which involves a Native group, the La Posta Band of Mission Indians, whose land — the Kumeyaay Nation — is bisected by the border. In that way, the border of the U.S. nation state continues to alienate Indigenous people from their land. One of the councilwomen of the La Posta Band, Cynthia Parada, said, “We see [the wall] as our halfway marker because it is directly halfway through our original Kumeyaay territory... A lot of religions talk about a homeland or a holy place, and something that’s sacred, and we tell them that everything that they look forward to or something that they pray to — that’s what we see, and that’s what we’re standing on.” For the La Posta Band, the land itself holds spiritual power, which is the antithesis to its abstract commodification under racial capitalism. That land holds the artifacts of their ancestors, and it is all sacred to them. Valuing these artifacts, to the point of staging a protest against the way the wall was being built, conveys the tangible importance of the land itself. It is not about how much the land is worth, whether it is being “cultivated,” or which nation state lays claim to it, but about feeling connected to the people who lived on that land before. According to Parada, people have declared the La Posta Band un-American for protesting how the wall is being built — but that’s besides the point. “When we look out to our land, ... we see our history, we see our culture, and it’s all just a gift,” she said. “It’s all sacred to us.” Land as an abstract commodity is an artificial, European imposition. That does not have to be how people approach land, which is clearly demonstrated by this group of people. They continue to resist the property-land relationship, despite constantly facing erasure. Parada said, “We feel like nobody really cares about us out here. They feel like nobody is out here, and they tell us all the time that ‘you can just move away, you can just leave,’ but for us on the reservation, you can’t.” The fact of the La Posta Band’s continued resistance to land abstraction is evident here. People say they can sell their land and move away, but they just can’t. Their land is home. Furthermore, the notion that “nobody is out here” fits into the idea of the American west being “empty” and requiring cultivation and incorporation into the U.S. These logics continue into today in ways that fit the particular needs of this moment. While the U.S. might not need more land for farming in the way it did in the 1800s and 1900s, under Trump, it needs land with which to assert its nationhood. And it can use the Kumeyaay Nation’s seemingly “empty” and “unproductive” land, destroying important artifacts in the process. Scholarly works on settler colonialism’s mutation of land through the development of the property relation and the borders of the nation state use land as an analytic in order to understand the ongoing process of colonization. Understanding these works can provide some insight into what the wall means to the La Posta Band, and why it’s there. Although the settler state attempts to naturalize its presence on and claims to land by characterizing colonization as a discrete event that happened far in the past, settler colonialism’s “historical foundation has not been surpassed but serves instead as material conditions reproduced in new ways in the present” (Goldstein 83). It becomes an ongoing project of reasserting claims to land and eliminating all other claims to land in order to firmly assert the settler state’s legitimacy. Indigenous land and territory, “‘the social and political order of Indigenous governance and society’... [that] cannot be equated or reduced to the property of European and North American legal philosophy and practice,” represents a significant threat to the sovereignty of the settler state (Barker 21). Indigenous lands, and relationships with land as practiced by communities, exist in opposition to the settler state, embodying simultaneously the histories of broken treaties, genocide, and settler conquest, and a real, ongoing resistance to the settler hegemony. The settler state works to naturalize its position by erasing indigenous people, situating them in a colonial past that is invisible in the present. Settler colonial narratives of erasure expand throughout settler society, serving to further naturalize the existence of the settler state. In her work on the impact of the 2008 financial crisis on indigenous communities and their erasure in critiques of the crisis, Barker argues that settler colonial narratives can appear even in those critiques, which “envision an empire, subprime crisis, and raciality in which Indigenous people are always already gone and how being gone is used as a narrative device for naming and theorizing other more relevant, current matters” (Barker 25). The erasure of indigenous people is so prevalent that it appears even in the writing of critics who claim to be going after an economic system that harmed so many in the 2008 crisis. Erasure runs so deep, that the critics missed the very people, arguably, whom capitalism has harmed the most. For the La Posta Band, the mechanism of erasure is the border wall. The presence of the border in itself is a means of rendering them and their sovereignty invisible. The imposition of borders on the land works to define the settler state’s sovereignty in relation to other nation-states, redefining relationships to land through the context of the settler state as opposed to the systems of governance and relation practiced by indigenous people, those who actually live on the land being divided into different nation states. To recognize these Indigneous peoples’ true territorial rights, in particular those that transgress national borders, would destabilize the legitimacy of the settler state. It is therefore because of their border transgression that the La Posta Band faces erasure. In this way, the border wall and its attendant destruction of native artifacts serve as a physical manifestation of erasure, a way for the U.S. settler state to violently exert its nationhood in the face of the La Posta Band’s lands not fitting its arbitrary demarcations. WORKS CITED
Bhandar, B. (2018). Introduction: Property, Law, and Race in the Colony [Introduction]. In Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership. Durham: Duke University Press. Barker, Joanne. “Territory as Analytic: The Dispossession of Lenapehoking and the Subprime Crisis.” Social Text, vol. 36, no. 2, 2018, pp. 19–39. Goldstein, A. (n.d.). The Ground Not Given: Colonial Dispositions of Land, Race, and Hunger. Social Text, 36(2), 83-106. King, T. L. (2016). The Labor of (Re)Reading Plantation Landscapes Fungible(Ly). Antipode, 48(4), 1022-1039. Krall, L. (2002). Thomas Jefferson’s Agrarian Vision and the Changing Nature of Property. Journal of Economic Issues,36(1), 131-150. doi:10.1080/00213624.2002.11506446 Melamed, Jodi. “Racial Capitalism.” Critical Ethnic Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 2015, p. 76., doi:10.5749/jcritethnstud.1.1.0076. Nichols, R. (2017). Theft Is Property! The Recursive Logic of Dispossession. Political Theory, 46(1), 3-28. doi:10.1177/0090591717701709 Singh, Nikhil Pal. “On Race, Violence, and So-Called Primitive Accumulation.” Social Text, vol. 34, no. 3 128, 2016, pp. 27–50., doi:10.1215/01642472-3607564.
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AuthorsJ.P. is a sophomore at Williams College majoring in history. He also dabbles in computer science — a potentially pointless pursuit because most of his interests lie in the social sciences and humanities — and is an editor on the Record, Williams’ student newspaper. He is originally from Chicago, Illinois, but hopes to get out of the midwest and live in New York City or Seattle one day. Categories |